


The Life You Keep Waking Up Into

by Miss_M



Category: True Detective
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/M, Family, Friendship, Gen, Partnership, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-01 20:23:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2786495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rust mows the Harts’ lawn and contemplates life, and family, and the nature of attraction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Life You Keep Waking Up Into

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lollard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lollard/gifts).



> I find the post-lawn mowing scene with Rust and Maggie (and Marty) incredibly intriguing and rich in all kinds of subtext, so I chose to focus on Rust’s perspective on it. 
> 
> Thanks to Lady_in_Red for checking that no Brit or other non-American idioms slipped through undetected. Title comes (with a twist) from episode 5. I own nothing.

The Harts’ neighborhood is reclaimed swampland, heat and humidity lending the lawns and neat houses an air like the miasma of primordial soup. Life began in a place like this, might as well end here, on this street, on this late afternoon. The grass Rust is mowing has a swampy, scummy smell, while in his memory, refracted through his scrambled senses and altered brain chemistry, Maggie smells of sunbaked earth and dry wildflowers, something solid yet dainty, though of course she smelled nothing like it. Rust knows he’s so full of shit it’s a wonder his eyes haven’t turned brown.

It ain’t like he couldn’t’ve bought himself a lawnmower. Rust ain’t one to go in for facile excuses, but sometimes the temptation is just too easy. 

Even sloshed as he was the night Marty strong-armed him into coming over for dinner, Rust had eyes to see that Maggie didn’t look her age, still had about her some of the cheerleader, the debutante, the inherently graceful girl who’d caught Marty’s eye years ago. Sleek, shiny Maggie and the two little girls, apples of their daddy’s eyes. Rust didn’t need or want to know the details of the Harts’ lives to see it all so clearly, like they were facing him in the box. Maggie watched him gulp coffee without annoyance, the poised hostess, fed him spaghetti and broccoli like he was a stray dog she took in.

There was maybe a little bit of Claire in her, though not much. Claire had been a redhead the last time Rust saw her. Sometimes he could almost believe Claire had never been real, he just dreamed her for a long, blurry time.

Rust’s used to people looking at him like he’s got a whole box of screws loose. He may be wound tight, but he sees things for what they are. Trying to find meaning in a universe utterly void of it – now that’s crazy. 

Marty’s always looking at him like that. Claire used to, sometimes, when she still looked at him, when he was still anything she could stand to see. 

Maggie doesn’t. She sees the man, the void, and looks at it straight on. It takes Rust by surprise. Not a lot does these days.

The girls whispered, giggling and shooting him looks. He didn’t bullshit them, gave them the courtesy of a straight answer, the older child, Audrey, forgetting about the food in her mouth as she regarded Rust in a new light. Yes, he’s shot people. Sophia was younger than Marty’s daughters when she died, and these girls look nothing like Rust’s daughter, who even at two had had his cheekbones and her mother’s hair, but he can imagine Sophia older, asking him questions which unveil the fundamental shittiness of life. No parent wants to answer those questions, but he’d have done it regardless, given his little girl a straight answer. Nothing else seems fair.

‘Fair’ used to mean ‘beautiful.’

Maggie gave him an opening to talk about Sophia when Marty came back into the kitchen. Didn’t push when Rust dodged, hid behind a piece of broccoli and watched the girls whisper about what they reckoned he was, the death of a child even younger than they going clean over their heads, only the man who’s shot his gun visible to them. 

Why did he stay? Marty being a shit might have made Rust feel a mite ornery, made him want to make Marty squirm, assuming Rust cared, but no. It was her, Maggie, who sat there judging him in the inevitable way of all humans, but gave him no bullshit, no smothering pity. She didn’t flinch from having such a broken creature in her home or pry or try to hug the revelation of Rust’s past close like a prize she won at a county fair.

So Rust stayed, feeling not exactly comfortable, probably intruding more than he usually does, other people’s lives being nothing he wants to trail behind himself. He stayed and ate, answered Maggie’s polite questions and let Marty glare and the girls giggle at him. An hour later, saying goodnight, his civilized mask firmly in place and his head throbbing just a little, he asked to borrow their lawnmower, because lacking the willpower to die means having to do dumb shit which never ends or gets finished, like feeding himself and not getting another drink and mowing the wild jungle outside his rental, even though that’s the landlord’s responsibility. Ownership of something separate, unto himself, would assume Rust means to stick around. Making a home is a fallacious notion.

He knows exactly what’s wrong with him. He’d better, he’s spent long enough thinking about it. The life he’s lead, the life he may yet lead, the unchanging, quiescent, moribund, stillborn eternity of it. The truths even more than the lies. 

Life.

He brings the mower back on a Saturday afternoon and offers to return the favor. Maggie doesn’t argue much, smiles her pretty, still young smile, lets him in after he’s done and gives him iced tea in the kitchen. Manners dressing up the illusion that life’s something more than a life-support system for the meat and skin and bones which are him and her. Good manners, though, Rust doesn’t mind basking in them for a little while, a lizard in the sun. Something primitive obeying its instincts, but only up to a point.

He guessed correctly: Maggie will find women to set him up with. Nice women, no doubt, pretty women. Matchmaking is a way for Maggie to feel like a god, creating and keeping what she’s created in existence. Make her feel like she can change things, like she’s not feeling the slightest twinge while he sits in her kitchen in his sweat-stained undershirt or red-eyed and quaffing coffee and unable to hold her gaze for long, in his dress shirt the night they invited him to dinner. Rust accepts the pointlessness of the effort more easily than Maggie does. Maggie’s just doing what she needs to survive. She’ll try to find him comfort she can’t offer herself and thus comfort herself by fixing up his life, like she might have fixed up his place if they were different people who led different lives.

Rust takes a swig of his iced tea, hides a grimace. Hubris, man’s commonest sin. Like Maggie would ever be that stupid. Like any man’s dick (Marty’s included) could outdo the pull of her children, trying to raise them right, with as little pain as possible, absorbing most of it herself. No help from her man as she holds the world together, an eggshell cupped between her palms. 

He doesn’t want to touch Maggie, not really, he’d no more do that to her than he’d pick up a china ballerina and fling it to the floor in Maggie’s pretty house. Rust wouldn’t ruin her with himself, and it would happen, whatever someone touches gets ruined, it’s just, fuck it, it’s life. Marty’s no better nor worse than most, and Rust has stopped lying to himself a long time ago. That doesn’t make envy any less of a waste of time. Being challenged by Maggie ain’t tense like her husband can make things tense, though she jumps to conclusions as much as anyone. 

As Maggie rags on him for settling in his ways, she too is nestled well within her comfort zone, already going through her roster of friends for a woman to set him up with. Rust can see it behind her clear brown eyes, but Maggie’s so at ease with it, her measure of wisdom and her dram of everyday bullshit, that he does not mind much. He can light his cigarette and drink the beverage she’s given him and even smile a little, stinking like a swamp in which nothing can grow, only putrefy, in his stained undershirt, in her spotless kitchen. He is better than he was, whatever Maggie thinks. Sometimes he almost remembers what it was like to want to play.

The little girls watch him over their shoulders, no longer whispering and giggling. Wondering what this stranger is doing in their mother’s kitchen, in their father’s place. Rust wouldn’t notice if he didn’t turn to look at the children, his weakness revealed to those who can see. 

The younger girl turns back to the TV almost at once, but the older one stares at Rust for a time, like she knows what he’s thinking. Of course she doesn’t, she’s nine, but she stands bristling and watchful at the door of her cave. She has Rust’s measure, and so he returns her look, no reassuring grin, no goofy grimace like he sometimes used to pull for Sophia. Audrey Hart ain’t Sophia, and Rust can’t decide if he was ever the man to pull faces to make a child smile, give her anything but the absurd, unadorned truth of the world. He has shot people and the girl knows this. There ain’t no fooling her now. She doesn’t know it yet, but her innocence is ending as a consequence. Rust feels neither guilty nor bad, certainly not proud. It happens to most people: an offhand remark, a drunken stranger at the dinner table, a car jumping the curb. Random occurrences are not an achievement anyone can rightly claim. 

Rust sees it in Marty at once, as soon as his partner walks through the door, the philanderer’s self-righteous suspicion, the offense taken by a man who doesn’t consider what happens to this woman, these children, this life, while he’s out getting it wet. Rust no longer lies to himself that this time it could be different, but he understands why Marty assumes otherwise. A man shouldering that load of guilt and self-loathing like a pack mule must assume the worst. Every fleeting indulgence increases his burden. Rust doesn't give a shit either way, giving a shit ain’t his indulgence, but he knows addiction when he sees it: how it starts from a place of despair and leads only into the empty desert. 

Be a bad place to find himself, between man and wife. Rust’s got no lookout to become their battlefield. If it comes right down to it, he likes Maggie well enough, but Marty’s his partner. For better, for worse, for the long haul – as long as Rust can push that rock up a steep hill. 

They face each other in the driveway because Marty won’t let it go, surrounded by the miasma of swampland turned suburbia turning back into the fucking jungle. Rust doesn’t push, for once, doesn’t use words or fists to cow his opponent. He discards his own stirring desire and envy, tough as a weed, and lets Marty off the hook. Marty doesn’t even see it, can’t see it. If he did, he’d have to accept that intentions don’t matter, only the things you did and lived through, whatever didn’t kill you and the damage you caused, only that shit stays with you. Only the void at your core. You don’t get a prize for enduring or a standing ovation for giving up. Survival doesn’t reward you with a shiny sash like some goddamn beauty queen, there’s no heavenly host standing around just waiting to embrace you. 

Rust understands this, understands his limitations, and so does Maggie, she knows instinctively where her limits are. Marty doesn’t, not yet at least, though maybe his innocence started to end too, a long, slow while before Rust glances into his rearview mirror and sees Marty standing all alone in his driveway, master of his lawn, his family in the house behind him become for a moment the strangers they always have been, feeling the weight of the universe bowing down his shoulders. All that dark matter, all that nothingness, for what may not be always but sure feels like it.


End file.
